Getting Into Fights with Data Centers

= Or, a Modest

Proposal for

Reframing

the Climate
Politics of ICT

———_ a a

LA =- A

Additionally: How to
use ping and
traceroute to find
the location of data
centers, and how to
look for DRAMA,
CONFLICT, and
OPPORTUNITIES TO
ORGANIZE WITH
OTHERS wherever
you find them

Acknowledgements:

This idea came out of a Digital Decarbonisation
workshop | was asked, in part, to develop for
Castlefield Gallery in April 2023. I'm grateful for
Jane Lawson, our convener, and all the gallery
staff and participants for the opportunity to work
my research into new shapes.

l'm further grateful for Mél Hogan, Dawn Nafus,
Dawn Walker, Tim Cowlishaw, Brian Sutherland,
Stefan Laser, Alex Nathanson, Benedetta Pi-
antella, Tega Brain, Andre Rosario/ hydroponic-
trash.solar and all my fellow travelers in the study
of the material impacts of digital systems for their
advice, research, and community. It’s been a
real pleasure to be in conversation with you alll.
Thanks also to Juniper Mitchell, Mel Gregg, Alex
Bruneau, Marije Miedema and Ed Platt for being
my invaluable test readers and Swati Mehta for
some stellar copy editing.

Finally, thanks also go to the Canadian govern-
ment’s research funding efforts for giving me
cash and time to think my little thoughts and
make my little zines (Canada Research Chairs
program, grant #: 950-233016).

A brief note to the reader:

This zine is an attempt to package up some long-
running academic ideas of mine into a more ac-
cessible format, sparking a conversation and
teaching a few new skills. If you want to geek out
further, | encourage you to follow the links, many
of which point to open-access (which is to say
free) academic articles. My goal for now, how-
ever, is to ease up on some of the jargon and
hedging that you find in that genre of writing. |
hope that, whoever you might be, you'll find this
zine easy to read, useful to your thinking, and re-
spectful of your intelligence. You can let me
know how | did (if you'd like) at
annepasek@trentu.ca.

Copyright:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Inter-
national License.

Suggested citation:

Pasek, Anne. “Getting Into Fights With Data Cen-
ters: Or, a Modest Proposal for Reframing the Cli-
mate Politics of ICT.” White Paper. Experimental
Methods and Media Lab, Trent University, Peter-
borough, Ontario. July 2023. https://emmlab.in-
fo/Resources_page/Data%20Center%20Fights-
_digital.padf.

fl Cover photo: A Google data center in
L A B Council Bluffs, Ilowa.

CC by Chad Davis.

What’s the carbon footprint

of our digital lives?

| made this zine because | keep getting asked this
question. There’s a growing number of people and
organizations who are anxious about climate change,
= aware that digital stuff plays a role in that, and sincerely
want to do something about this in their personal or
professional lives. Sometimes it’s artists wondering if
their creative practices online might be producing
outsized harms. Sometimes it’s small organizations
looking to find internal policies for email or file storage
that can strike a balance between utility and ecological
sufficiency. At other times, it’s colleagues of mine in =
academia, looking to embrace lower-carbon ways of A
working, connecting, and archiving, all with an eye to the
steadily rising amount of digital stuff in the cloud and
CO, in the air.

It's encouraging to see so many people pose this
question. I’m part of a community that studies the
energy and carbon impacts of digital networks, and it
used to feel like our biggest challenge was just getting
people to understand that online files and services
aren't the immaterial stuff of sleek corporate
infographics or the whole metaphor of ‘the cloud.’ That
cloud, we’d endlessly reply, is just someone else’s
computer. Most likely, it’s a computer stuck in an

è

RE

annan

enormous data center somewhere sort of rural, where it
consumes impressive amounts of electricity (to power
the facility) and water (to cool down all those hot
servers).

To give an example, take Google’s data center in Dalles,
Oregon. It cost more than $1.8 billion to build and is
several football fields wide. The facility uses more than
350 million gallons of water (almost a third of the total
water use for the city) and likely more than 330 million
kWh of electricity (more than 2/3rds of the electrical
demand for the whole utility district). Thats a lot—
especially considering Google’s often better than a lot of
its peers on sustainability stuff. Worryingly, Google has
strived, through non-disclosure agreements and legal
battles, to keep past and potential future water_rates
secret.

So how bad is the problem, really? Estimates put
the ICT sector somewhere between 2-4% of all

the carbon emissions produced each year
across the planet (not including crypto). That's
not insignificant, but it’s also not apocalyptic. |
like to tell people that it’s a ‘medium sized
problem.’ However, there are bigger concerns
and uncertainties about the future trajectory of
the sector. Researchers disagree about whether
or not the carbon emissions of digital systems
are growing just a little or are set to explode in
future years. (Personally, | think the extreme
estimates on either end are dubious). But
whatever way you look at it, if the sector wants
to keep pace with the wider climate
commitments of the Paris Agreement, it will
need to reverse course and reduce emissions.
That requires changing norms and habits—
probably both for consumers and industry
players.

This circles back to the question of digital carbon
footprints. It’s normal for us to want to think through
sustainability problems with the assistance of a little
quantification. There’s even a growing number of online
calculators to help you assess exactly how bad your own
digital emissions might be.t If you’re sending an email,
watching a video, or archiving your data in a cloud back
up, you can find a carbon number for your actions.

The trouble is, | think that this is often the wrong
question to ask—at least in terms of the carbon costs of
discrete consumer action.

' Here's a few to try if you're curious: https://ecotree.green/en

calculate-digitaLco2; https://thenetworkedcondition.com/ https://

www.websitecarbon.com/.

3

This is really frustrating! It means that our first impulse,
to focus on our own actions and to ask how we can better
align them with our ethics, isn’t a terribly useful starting
point for learning how digital networks actually work or
how to change them. In fact, | worry that it risks teaching
the wrong lessons, leaving us with an inflated sense of
our individual importance and agency. It’s kind of the
same mistake that we’ve made with plastic recycling: we
can be overinvested in the morality of individual actions,
completely missing how larger industrial factors have a
far bigger impact.

A_nerdy network aside: Why am | so skeptical about these
tools? In part because calculators use a lot of assumptions that
make their outputs look way more precise than they actually
are. All the footprinters you can find online have to make
approximations about the carbon intensity of electricity, the
ind of devices you're using, the efficiency of the wider
network, and the path your data takes across it. All these factors
fluctuate over time and place, so what these tools can calculate
is really just an estimate from a model—not a ‘true’ answer.

But more importantly, these answers give us the wrong
impression about how to actually reduce emissions. We're
used to thinking about carbon footprints in a certain way: one
where the connections between our consumer habits and
environmental impacts are pretty direct. We all know the script:
if we want to make the number go down, we need to
consume less.

But wait, surely consumer demand counts for something! You
could argue that withdrawing your participation from digital

businesses that have an outsized impact on the climate has still
got to be at least a little helpful. Even if it doesn’t lessen the
immediate carbon intensity of our digital systems, maybe it'll
reduce the market signals for these kinds of businesses, such that
they'll slow or reduce their operations. Voting with your dollar
counts, right?

This makes sense for stuff like car travel or beef, but it doesn’t
hold true in the same way for network data. This is because, for
information to travel across our networks, much of the
equipment that makes up that network needs to be always on,
always available. Its electrical draw is fixed—it consumes the
same amount regardless of how much data is moving through
the figurative tubes. When you use a calculator to estimate the
carbon footprint of streaming, sending, or storing something, it
takes a guess at a proportionate share of all the energy
consumed by the networks entangled in that action. However,
this doesn’t mean that swearing off Netflix will actually result in
a commensurate reduction in the network's electrical use or its
resulting climate impacts. The network is going to stay on; the
data centre hosting that video will still draw the same amount
of power.

Well sure, but just like voting in general, you'll only win things if
you have real numbers behind your cause. A coordinated
boycott is likely necessary to have much of an impact.
Greenpeace sort of gestured at the possibility of one a while ago,
but no one ultimately ever hit the ‘boycott’ switch (and in fact
their campaign focused almost as much on consumer loyalty and
appreciation as it did on environmental concerns). Boycotts could
be a tactic worth trying again in the future, but we'd definitely
need lots of friends and allies to pull it off.

What’s a better question?

These days whenever I’m asked what the climate impact
of X network thing might be, | pivot and instead try to
start a conversation about how we can stop the next
data center from being built.

(Think of those ‘one less car’ stickers you see on
commuter bikes, but with a digital twist.)

| like this frame because it :

1. Makes it a collective, rather than individual, concern
(goodbye and good riddance, green saviour
complex);

2. Keeps our focus on the infrastructure rather than the
content (and so maybe helps avoid some unhelpful
moralism about what kinds of content are
ecologically and morally justified);

? | should probably be specific about what and who I'm calling
out here. [he Shift Project is a French non-profit that’s been active
in the digita-climate sphere for a while now, and with some
pretty apocalyptic predictions for the future state of things. They
anticipate that we'll need to drastically constrain the legal liberties
of ICT companies in the future if we want to avoid climate
catastrophe, and so call for wider social debates about the kinds

6

Encourages us to think about sufficiency and
degrowth (which is to say, we aren’t against digital
networks in the general, just against their
unthinking/infinite expansion);

Encourages us to keep the relative scale of things in
mind, rather than just our personal actions (i.e.
ChatGPT emits way way way way way way way more
than your cat photos ever will);

Centers our attention on particular places and
communities where specific and disproportionate
impacts will be felt (rather than only the global
abstraction of the climate—though | care a lot about
that too);

Opens the door to exciting coalitions (see the
previous box about the need to make friends in order

to win things).

of content that should be first on the chopping block when it
comes time to set limits (so, you Know, we'll be ready to ban that
bad stuff). In particular, they go out of their way to suggest that
online porn is worth particular scrutiny. But, as a feminist who
takes a lot of cues from sex workers struggling for better working
conditions, | am pretty worried about where that line of thinking
might take us. This isn't to say that | think that all online content is
equally valid (for me, I’d put ad tech, bitcoin, and a lot of Al on the
chopping block), just that | strongly suspect that starting from the
perspective of what we want to ban leads to a very different—and
| fear, less successful-political project than discussing what kinds
of physical structures we do (or do not) want to build.

n

Of course, this perspective also leaves some stuff out.
This might include:
= improvements we could make to network and
software efficiency,

= potentially quite helpful green power purchases
by big tech giants, or

= environmentally beneficial uses of big chunky
data sets and machine learning tools.

| have my suspicions about the sufficiency of these
strategies without a bigger picture focus on degrowth,
however. What’s more important, though, is that these
areas are mostly matters of internal corporate policy and
expertise rather than broad civic engagement. If you, as
an individual or non-tech organization, are looking for a
place to dig in, I’d like to suggest that the best place to
do so is around resisting data center expansions.*

3 | wrote a book, in part, about the limits of efficiency as an

environmental strategy. In brief, you can be incredibly efficient and
have tons of renewables going into your facilities but, if your growth
outpaces your savings, the problem is still getting worse! Plus,
researchers have shown that splashy green Al efforts by big
companies are often first and foremost a PR effort. Let’s not let a little
green good take our eyes completely off the prize of those wider
climate targets.

* Maybe you're a tech worker or academic? By all means, read on,
but | hope you'll also think about the specific opportunities that are
unique to you, your domains of expertise, and your labor conditions.
These could all well be better uses of your energy than where | go
with this zine. You'll know better than me!

8

\

En

But why data centers?

Great question. Data center construction has been
booming for the past decade or so, with demand
predicted to grow a continuing 10% per year through
2030. Right now, there are active plans in the works to
build at least 300 more hyperscale facilities. If all those
data centers get built, that will lock in many cities’ worth
of water and electricity consumption (even if they are
ultra-efficient-state-of-the-art-ecological-angel facilities).

This is on top of all the data centers we’ve already got
kicking around—and they’re growing too. By some
estimates, there are 8,000 or so in the world today, and
many of these are slated for further expansions. It’s
common for tech companies to build these sites with
growth in mind, adding additional buildings and servers
over time as demand continues.

Why are data centers booming? It’s true that the
pandemic did hike the use of network services while
many of us stayed at home (and in some cases, continue
to do so today). However, the relationship between
supply and demand with data centers is much weirder
than this story might imply. Instead, as Mél Hogan
argues, there’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in

the sector: tech executives work hard® to continually
produce increasing amounts of cheap data storage,
believing that this excess capacity is necessary to meet
the needs of emerging business cases for cheap data
storage. Sure enough, those cases often follow, but it’s
not clear that they would have created that demand
without the supply already being promised at bargain
prices. It’s a chicken and egg thing—or, as Mél puts it, a
“solution in search of a problem.”

We see that ‘solution’ evidenced today in the rise of
many varied data- and compute-intensive applications.
Things like ChatGPT, companies that act as
‘prospectors’ running analytics on massive health
datasets, or general web3/crypto weirdness all wouldn’t
be possible without the guarantee of cheap data
storage. We live in a digital world increasingly defined by
this presumption. It all adds up to far greater climate
impacts than personal consumer habits alone.®

Who does this boom benefit? Those aforementioned
tech executives, to be sure, along with the holders of
stock options and judiciously invested venture capital.
But, when it comes to the communities that have to live
with all this digital infrastructure, the picture is much

° Maybe not as much as the IT folks on call working underneath
them, granted.

° I've previously tried to map out some of these differences in scale.
Again, I'll repeat my caveat about the precision of these sorts of
footprinting numbers, but | think it’s Useful to make these
comparisons when they help illuminate what's really a difference in
kind, not just degree.

10

murkier. It’s often the case that different counties are
enticed to compete with one another to offer more and
more lucrative tax incentives to companies that might
build a data center in their city. This results in a bit of a
race to the bottom, where property tax revenues from
these facilities can run rather gaunt. Employment
benefits are also minimal; after the construction work of
a new facility is done, data centers don’t hire many local
people. What’s more, for the many ‘internet landlords’
leasing server space to the tech companies that don’t
build their own their facilities (which is to say, most of
them), tax breaks and loop holes let them avoid hundreds
of millions of dollars each year in income tax. Taken
together, data centers often look like they take more than
they give.

These are a few of many reasons why I think we should all
try to get into at least one fight with a data center. It will
be salutary for our sense of scale, our climate feelings,
and our ability to build coalitions and organize across
various local and regional political concerns. If we can
stop the next data center from being built (or endlessly
expanded), and if we can create a wider movement
contesting the social and ecological licence of these
facilities, we can directly impact the climate trajectory of
the tech sector overall. And, even if we fail, raising a fuss
increases the likelihood of winning better economic
concessions and legal regulations for these things down
the road.

ti

My first answer here would be to look into the data
centers near where you live and work. If there’s a facility

in your community (or plans to build one soon), it will
likely impact you and your neighbours in some way. Data
centers can affect your local water table (especially if
you live somewhere prone to drought), electrical prices,
and the likelihood of black outs. They can also cause
deeply unpleasant (and unending) noise pollution to
people and animals that live close to these sites. As
someone living in the wake of these structures, and
(likely) as a political constituent of the region, you’ve got
stakes and sway in that fight.

What if your local area is data center free? Well, you’ve
still got plenty of relationships with data centers,
stretching out to plenty of regions, that you could tap
into. The cloud, as you’ll recall, is just Someone else’s
computer. Let’s explore where those computers are by
tracing your data back to its resting place.

(Ate

į

Stock photo here taken from ENI, an oil and gas company (hence, | guess, why this gentleman is wearing a hard hat in between server racks?). Oil and
gas prospecting is another growth area for data centers and big data analytics. Anyways, thanks ENI for the CC license, and may you be defanged or
obliterated in the energy transition...

12 13

Finding out where your data STEP 2: PING TO GET YOUR IP

lives If you don’t already have an IP address, we'll start with
a simple ping command. This is a way to sort of ‘knock
[FUN ACTIVITY/TECH DIGRESSION STARTS on the door’ of a website, get that IP address, and see if
someone’s home. To do so, we’ll use a terminal program
HERE] (if you’ve never touched one before, prepare to feel like

a very cool hacker type).

STEP 1: PICK A TARGET

Pick something online that’s meaningful to you—that
thing that you’d otherwise be wanting to calculate with a
carbon footprinting tool and wring your hands over.
Maybe it’s your go-to website for passing the time, an
online project you built, your meme stash, a web3 hate-
watch, or your favorite multiplayer game. Anything with a
URL or IP address will work.

I

' What’s an IP address? It’s a set of 4 numbers that
: works like a ZIP/postal code for the vast mail system
: of the Internet. IP is short for Internet Protocol, which
' are a bunch of rules written in the early days of the
f
I
I
I
I

Internet to ensure that your requests and replies all
eventually go where they should, even if they take
different paths across the middle of the network.

You, in a hot minute.

14 15

I
NB: I’m going to use Castlefield Gallery’s i
website as my example here because | first į
developed this activity for a workshop they :
hosted. By doing so | don’t mean to imply 1
that they're outrageous climate villains or |
even worth extra scrutiny. To the contrary, }
their digital set up is pretty bog standard. '
Feel free to follow along, taking them as a i
demo, or jump right in with your own site of }
interest. !

= Open your terminal program

For Windows Users
Click on the search bar in your lower lefthand tool bar,
type in CMD, then hit enter

For Mac Users
Open Terminal by navigating to Applications/Utilities or
hitting CMD+Spacebar and typing ‘Terminal’

= Type ping castlefieldgallery.co.uk (or
a different website you’re interested in examining) and
hit enter.

= Look for a set of 4 numbers punctuated by
periods (51.89.229.122 is Castlefield’s) in the
output. This is the IP address. You now have their digital
postal address!

E Command Prompt - ping 5$1.59.229.122

uk [51.89.229.122] with 32 bytes of data:

16

STEP 3: GEOLOCATING IP ADDRESSES

Unlike the postal system, however, IP addresses don’t
point to an obvious physical place where you can dump
your physical mail. There’s plenty of reasons why the folks
setting up a website or network service do not want it to be
thus. However, there’s also a trail of domain registration
info that we can poke at to get some clues of where in the
world this data might be hosted. To do so, we’ll turn to a
few free look up services.

— Go to https://www.ipaddress.com/ip-
lookup, https: //www.ip2 location. com/

demo/, or https ://www.maxmind. com/en/
geoip-demo. Enter the IP into their search field.’

QD rorem com Whaley
Tee bee Pacem Tat 37 19.293 20) B

IP Lookup : 51.89.229.122

f
, + WHITEC

* London

’ An alternative here is to enter curl ipinfo.io/[your IP of
interest] in your terminal program.

17

a Find the latitude and longitude (51°30’31” N
0°5’34” W is Castlefield’s) and enter it into GoogleMaps
(or other mapping program).

= This will likely probably plunk you in the middle of
somewhere without an obvious data center in view. So,
with your map zoomed around these general
coordinates, search for ‘data centre,’ ‘cloud,’ or ‘web
hosting’ until you find a business that looks like a
plausible match.

NB: Be skeptical of addresses located right in the middle of
expensive city real estate. Unless there's an IXP or submarine cable
landing station nearby, chances are the IP address website has
given you the location of the corporate offices of company that
registered the website, not necessarily the location hosting its
content. Sometimes, to offer a bit of privacy, IP look up tools will
also simply point to the address of the closest city centre. If you're
not finding anything, or if you're only finding financial centre
boutique businesses, check your look up tool of choice for ISP
internet service provider) names. Pick up the trail on GoogleMaps
with that info.

For instance, in the case of Castlefield Gallery, the geographic
coordinates plunked me right in the middle of the Thames in a
very posh part of London. The chances of a data center being
built here are slim—'ll need to widen my search. Looking back at
my IP location lookup site, | can see that something called OVH is
isted in the fields for both Castlefield’s ISP and domain. Using this
as my search term points me to OVH’s London headquarters in a
swanky skyscraper.’ The company probably used this address to
register their domain info, but it’s again pretty unlikely that they've
Stuffed all their servers into a pricy and fairly vertical office.

(This ain't it...)

8 When poking around a site | like to use Google Street View to
confirm whether or not the vibes are off. Anything with outwards
facing glint (sleek windows, lobby art, a property manager's stylish
website for prospective tenants, etc.) or even just a fair bit of height is
cause for suspicion. Your data center is much more likely to be a
beige, sprawling warehouse, fenced off from the world (but also
Le cnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nn mm m trying to look sort of unassuming about it).

18 19

= ovh data centres a x K Rating ~ Q Hours ~ FE Allfitters | WANSTEAD aans wu Romford
-f N —— — _ NEWBURY PARK
Wanstead Park i Search this area
OVHcloud a ~ en
45 {45) Cah. see
Web hosting company 9 aieka e Pford
Opens 12 am. Tue -+339 London Sn E
72 10 1007 Murugan Temple W wron
ordon Si Parsioes Park at
HACKNEY STRATFORD P Monalakshimi Temp -A wne
OVH ISLINGTON Victo ri
Victoria Park Barking
as m) EAST HAM
Web hosting company - 8 Viking we Hat
Way Cou
Open 24 hours MLE END
‘itis , Museurn CANNE TUNN cassai Rainha
OVHcloud ovHeloud Telehouse West Telehouse London
27 (42)
Web hosting company - New CANARY WHARF
ndon House, 6 London St
London E Land cohort us ise
Pie. + PERS TER. ROTHERHITHE

Tue» +44 333 370 0425 AMBETH BERMONDSEY GREENWICH Morian ASEM AL

OVH Public cloud performance and pricing is way
better compared ..”

lehou: ndon Data Télegragh Mill Greenwich
= — CAMBERWELL Upper Park Park
Centres

ag fora

I

1 So, let's keep looking. Zooming out of the London city
+ center reveals another hit for OVH further down the
t Thames in a slightly more inglorious borough called
1 Erith. This site is located on a one way street next to a
ı busy traffic artery and a set of factories and distribution
centers. This is much more like it! Seen on Street View,
its an obvious match: there's a telecommunications
1 tower out front chock full of antennas, next to a bunch
. of modified shipping containers stacked on top of each
! other (almost surely full of server racks). Other tells
1 include security gates, two massive power boxes with
; electrocution warnings, and a ‘thieves beware’ sign
"explaining how clever forensic devices in the cables,
1 metals, and equipment on the site will thwart efforts to
ı steal and sell any stolen goodies. Oh yes—we've got a
, data center on our hands. A quick search across OVH's
1 Own website confirms that they have only one data
ı center location in the UK, and it’s in Erith. We've found
, our match.

I

(This is more like it!)

Se i ee

Troubleshooting with

traceroute

Of course, this might not be so simple. Maybe your IP
geolocation data is absolutely in the middle of nowhere,
or it’s proving tricky to make the jump from the offices of
the folks who registered the IP address to the digital
warehouse where the digital stuff actually is. We have
another trick up our sleeve: we can run a traceroute.

This is a diagnostic tool used by clever IT people (and
malicious hackers) looking to trace the route data takes
across the network to get from point A or point B.
Internet traffic can change its paths dynamically as stuff
goes offline or comes back up after maintenance, so you
may not get the same results from one day to the next.
In general, though, you can often find some useful hints
about the sea of routers and exchange points your data
moves across, all of which can help you zero in on where
your target must be located, relative to the rest of your
traceroute.

STEP 1: RUN YOUR TRACEROUTE COMMAND
Traceroute works by sending a message to each router

in the path to reaching your destination, and then
getting those routers to send little messages back to

22

your computer identifying who they are. If all works well,
you'll end up with a list of all the steps (called ‘hops’),
how long it took each of them to respond, and their IP
addresses. It’s this latter information that we're
interested in, since we already have some tools to
translate those IP addresses into approximate
geographic coordinates. Taken altogether, this can draw
a map of how your data actually moves across the planet
(and thus where it ultimately comes from).

To initiate a traceroute, open up your terminal program,
just like we did with ping. Then, type the following:

For Windows Users
A tracert [your IP address] (then hit
enter)

For Mac Users
a traceroute [your IP address] (then hit
enter)

STEP 2: INTERPRETING THE RESULT

Reading the output of a traceroute takes a bit of practice.
Your computer will output a series of lines showing hop
numbers, times, and IP/domain information.

Each hop represents a location in the network that your
request passes through. The first few lines are always
going to be your local network with a lot of private IP
addresses (and so, not terribly insightful).

23

ee E eee eee
Pinging netflix.com [3.225.92.8] with 32 bytes of data
Request timed o
Request timed o

Request timed o

I I
I I
! NB:"* / Request times out” means that ;
È the router refused to send a message back to !
1 your computer. It happens sometimes! A lot s
"of components in the Internet arei
;
I I
I I
I I
I I
I I
I I

Request timed o

Ping statistics fc
4 (100% loss),

configured to ignore traceroute prompts
because they want to avoid those malicious
hackers/keep traffic down. “Nothing
personal,” I’m sure they'd say.

3. compute-1.amazonaws.com [3.225.92.8] (Fm hiding my home

IP address from youl)

3 ms mynetwork.home [#30 SIBE] ) My local network

10.11.1.9
Request timed out

{This is the IXP)

Routing
traffic in
Canada

3/3_38.net.bell.ca [64.230.59.184]
4.net.bell.ca [142.124.127.215]
dredgigeð-2-0-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.97.147]

NB: If your traceroute won't start, or if it looks
to start from a location very far away from

I
I
z e eee |
AWS in North Virginia ı you, try disabling your VPN and/or any ad
I
'
I

quest timed o
Rast thea oot blockers that aren't specific to an internet
browser program. (This gets me pretty much
every time).

Request timed o
rs 52.93.28.98

[Hahaha.... Don’t hack me bro)

Next you’ll probably hit an internet exchange point
(IXP)—think of this as a bit of an on-ramp to the glorious
information superhighway. These sometimes have
names of cities in the information that comes before the
IP addresses (or at least, abbreviations thereof. ‘Toro’
can mean Toronto, and so on).

NB: Running a traceroute can take a bit of
time. If you want to abandon ship, or if you
think things might be stalled, just hit ctrl c
simultaneously to stop.

The exciting stuff comes next: lots of seemingly random
IP addresses. Try piecing together the geographic path

of your data by looking up the locations of each IP
address using the same tools as before. You might write
down the cities in a list, or try putting down pins on a
map. In this way, even if you can’t determine the location
of the final IP, the path leading up to it can offer useful
clues.?

24

? If you're still stuck, or if you want to cross reference, a few other tools
you could play around with are https://traceroute-
online.com/mtr/, https://geotraceroute.com, or
https://hackertarget.com/online-traceroute/. |
personally find them a little more error prone and hard to parse, but
you might be built different! You could also try on a different day (and
so maybe a different route through the network).

25

Once you’ve found your data

centre

Congrats on using neat network tools to find your digital
whale! But now that you know where and what it is, it’s
time to learn a little more about the local political story of
your leviathan.

SOME TIPS FOR GETTING THE GOSSIP:

= Try visiting it in Google Street View (potentially
comparing image captures from different years).

1. Does it announce what it is, or does it try to blend in
with its surroundings inconspicuously?

2. Has the site changed much over the years?

3. How heavily secured does it seem to be?

4. Does it follow along/terminate in a path for goods
and information built in a prior era (a colonial port,
rail network, or pipeline)? Or is it built smack in the
middle of nowhere?

= Read its reviews in Googlemaps. Do people

complain about the noise/security?

26

a Search for it (or for data centers in the region) in

the news (https://news.google.com). Experiment with
adding keywords like ‘energy,’ ‘consultation,’ or ‘policy’ if
you get too many hits.

= On the basis of all this, ask yourself some
questions:

1. What potential land use, energy, or water conflicts
might exist because of the data centre?

2. How clean do you think its electrical use might be?
How vast?

3. Why was it built where it was?

4. Who benefits from the data center being here? Who
loses?

Reviews Q = Sort
Reviews

Keith Te e
ca j 4 review : Jack In RVA

Local Guide 119 reviews
xk 1 months ag vere

2 years ago
| haven't been there Under construction. Major remodeling and expansion
| was just looking for a place on the map ! ongoing.
i) Like < Share
w Jim Stowe
€D kk iui
@ gary beard tke tek
ca je 205 review ` An awe inspiring and life changing experience. After

visiting here | became unbelievable rich and extremely

REKKK 4years ag handsome. Lifa will newer be the same

Not allowed to take pictures in here so heres some stars

> Like < Share

€- Kevin Tyson
IO Local Guide - 93 reviews

$ Quentin Deburge à

cal Guide - 42 reviews i kk 5 years ago
aK KK A year ag’ A datacentre
Always on top forklift drivers 27

See original (French)

To go back to our example of Castlefield Gallery, this
digital sleuthing reveals that security on site is a little
tight, and also that it’s undergone a recent expansion (all
the containers out front appeared sometime after
2016). Snooping around news sites and press releases
helps explain why: OVH expanded its Erith site post-
Brexit, anticipating that there would be demand for more
national data services in a Britian that was no longer a
part of the EU (thus EU data privacy laws). So, all these
boxes of servers and electrical transformers, in part, owe
their existence to the Leave campaign.

T X industry X Techaokgy w
Management Sectors Topics

customers, who OVH has invited to use its Discover OVH product to test out the facility. It also w

add a wider selection of its products to the London region later this year

The datacentre opening is proof of the company’s post-Brexit commitment to London, according

to Parekh

The UK market interfaces with international businesses, not only in Europe but around the world

So by having a physical presence in the UK, OVH is not only addressing the local market at

SMEs [small to medium-sized enterpri

5] or even large companies, we're also supporting

nternational trade through new and substantial export opportunities,” he said

The UK is a fantastic market, it’s obviously a very vibrant market for business and it represents

huge international opportunity for OVH moving forward.”

This is all interesting (or, at least, it is to nerds like me),
but maybe not a boiling political fight. Sometimes,
however, you do find exactly that.

28

What do data center conflicts
look like?

Let’s look at Netflix. If you live in the Eastern United
States, a good part of your streaming content probably
sits in the data centers Netflix leases from Amazon in
Ashburn, Virginia. Following the IP (99.82.178.222)
takes you to a mega complex on Gloucester Parkway. It’s
about the size of a small neighbourhood, and is stuffed
full of cooling vents and electrical equipment.

Zoom out and you'll find lots of similar complexes in the
area. North Virginia is called ‘data center alley’ because
there’s so many of these things lying about. The
expansive growth of data centers here looks like
“suburban sprawl on steroids,” resulting in

10 There are so many really interesting reasons for why this is the case:
the tax breaks here are especially good, it’s close to DC (and thus
ucrative military contracts with low latency requirements), it’s a
coastal region with lots of subsea cables running to Europe and a
elative lack of hurricanes, there’s lots of empty factories with good
preexisting electrical infrastructure because of waves of
deindustrialization, and a bunch of fiber got laid across the state with
egional development funds that came from lawsuits against the
tobacco industry for the whole ‘lying about cigarettes causing
cancer’ thing. Life (and the politics of infrastructure) can take strange
turns.

29

deforestation, rainwater runoff problems, and worsening
air quality. It’s also gotten to the point where these
facilities are bumping up against residential areas,
where the loud and constant noise of all those cooling
fans are causing headaches and sleeping issues for
some. They’re also poised to strain the electrical grid
with all their AC requirements during this year’s summer
months. In response state regulators have toyed with
issuing special exemptions to let data centers run diesel
generators to boost their power intake (but also the air
pollution and climate impacts of these facilities). Data
centers often don’t make for good neighbors.

30

To be fair, sometimes the press also has positive things
to say about tech development and climate change. Data
center companies are leading a wave of green power
purchasing agreements, helping to bring new renewable
energy sources onto the grid. (I’m particularly enthused
about efforts like Google’s 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy
plan, which is pushing grid operators to get way more
granular about the challenges and potential solutions of
a future where we have more renewable power on our
grids, and thus a lot more dynamic shifts between supply
and demand to balance out).

These are laudable goals; however, green power isn’t
always an unqualified good. Julia Velkova, for instance,
has been tracking how one particular case of Google’s
renewable power purchasing efforts has become
embroiled in land use conflicts with Sami people in
Sweden, who stand to lose access to traditional grazing
lands with the construction of a wind power park. They’re
calling it "green colonialism."

It’s also the case that the simple math of data center
growth and green power ambitions may not always be

31

reconcilable. Ireland, a major tax loophole jurisdiction
and thus home to many of Europe’s data centers, is an
instructive example. Waves of newly planned data
centers are set to far outpace electrical supplies in the
country. If all proposed data centers were actually built,
the sector could consume up to 70% of Ireland’s entire
electrical capacity by 2030. It’s hard to imagine that
demand being met entirely by new renewable energy
developed on this timeline. If it were, all those solar and
wind parks would still need to go somewhere, likely
stirring up further community and land use conflicts.
More fundamentally, though, if we’re only adding new
green capacity to our grid to meet new demand, we will
continue to fail to make a dent on our wider
decarbonization goals. We need more than just a green
licence for new growth, we need to slash the carbon-
intensity of the grid as it stands.

Elsewhere, fights with data centers might look more like
conflicts about the kinds of landscapes and livelihoods
that we value as a Culture. In the Netherlands there has
been an upwelling of resistance against data center
expansion, all of which eventually culminated in a
nation-wide moratorium on new data center
construction and a change of federal power. Opposition
here was initially derived in part from contested water
rights during a drought and concerns around
democratic deficits in infrastructural permitting. More
boisterously, these efforts were joined by a populist
farmer movement united in their dislike of how data
centers have encroached into rural landscapes. As one
leader puts it, “It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data
centers boxes here.”

32

So how do we get into fights

with data centers?

As these examples show, struggles to halt data center
expansions can take many forms. Sometimes, like the
Dutch, you might elect new leaders to government. In
other instances, more modest goals could be the
priority: organizing neighbours, getting media coverage,
and pushing for increased regulatory scrutiny.

If there’s already a movement forming around
Opposition to your data center of interest, plug in. Join
groups, show up to meetings, or offer your solidarity and
support from afar. If there isn’t yet a group, trying
organizing one.** Start a Facebook group, write a letter

l! Are you new to community organizing? It’s one of those often

difficult, but really rewarding and sort of essential human skills.
Like any skill, anyone can learn how to do it and it takes a lot of
practice to build up your confidence and instincts. For a good
place to start, | recommend the Rebel Steps podcast or Labor
otes’ union organizer materials (most of which can be adopted
Utside of the union context).

O

33

:

aaa ada | aad add agg aai

"PrE.

(Stylishly m
done)

to the editor of a local paper, start a conversation on a
city subreddit, chat up your contacts in the area, and
maybe build towards getting a resolution passed by a
local civic association, labor union, or city council.

With enough people, you can explore more creative
tactics. This might involve spectacular (and thus media-
friendly) protests like Extinction Rebellion lreland’s
amazing vampire-themed demonstration against Meta’s
data centers. In other contexts, you might work on a
project of citizen science data acquisition, like
researchers at Cornell who are experimenting with using
bird decoy drones to collect data about the thermal
impacts of bitcoin mines in the Finger Lakes. Even more
inventively, you could explore tactics like working to cut
off water rights to existing data centres (like, say, those
run by the NSA) or building charmingly low-tech
alternatives to the hyperscale cloud.

(The goose contains a remote
controlled propeller, camera, and
thermal sensors. | guess this is
another sort of strange bedfellow!}

34

Anti-data center efforts can also learn a lot from previous
movements fighting to curtail unwanted developments of
all kinds. The history of pipeline opposition is one
illuminating and obvious example. These activists
demonstrate how researching permitting procedures,
environmental impact requirements, and key political
actors in development decisions are all essential steps,
as are forming wider coalitions of different groups to
stand with you. At times, these might make for strange
bedfellows. For folks fighting fossil fuel infrastructures,
this has meant a mix of NIMBYs, frontline environmental
justice communities, anxious climate weirdoes like me,
local businesses, and tourists. Not everyone will be there
for the same reason, and not everyone will necessarily
even believe that climate change is a serious issue. (In
the case of the Dutch protesters, for instance, many
farmers were initially mobilized against climate
regulations on their farms).

That said, we don’t yet know what the full span of data
center opposition politics will or should look like. As Julia
Rone argues, in order for local victories to scale up to
wider changes, there will need to be more transnational
conversations about organizers’ strategies and
experiences. The hazard, of course, is that a data center
project might be shoo-ed away from one municipality,
only to take up shop in another, perhaps more distant
location. Stopping a project here doesn’t mean that it
won't be built elsewhere. This means that a final (and
probably quite essential) way you can get into fights with
data centers is to help with the work of archiving and
sharing many different local efforts. This zine aims to be
a small contribution to this end.

35

36

But what could we win?

The prizes here will look as different as the coalitions
that gather around them.

To folks like me, two major reasons to grapple with data
centre expansions include 1) wider climate trajectories
and 2) political suspicions about the kind of world that
endless data storage is slowly building. Setting limits on
digital infrastructure—or even beginning with the
assumption that what we currently have might already
be sufficient—could help foster a culture of technical
maintenance and repair over and above an emphasis on
innovation (regardless of the social or climate cost). It
would be great to learn how to be better stewards of
what we’ve already built instead of playing regulatory
catch up with the infrastructural and digital monsters
that lurk on the horizon. Plus, again and with emphasis,
this climate change thing is pretty bad. We should do
something about it.

37

SSN

SSS
DLN

To those living in the shadow of data centers,
however, | suspect the rewards will be a little more
immediate and tangible: being able to open your
window without being overwhelmed by whining
fan sounds, lessening the load on your
groundwater during a drought, keeping farmland
fertile, reducing the risk of black outs and rate
hikes, and ensuring that the businesses that do
set up shop in your city actually pay their fair share
of taxes.

Regardless of the outcome, | strongly suspect that
this path will also bring its share of rewards
through the very process of struggle. These are in
part analytic: by being clear about the need to
reduce sectoral emissions, rather than just
increase efficiency, we can avoid slights of hand
that obscure fundamental differences in scale or
emphasize the wrong sorts of metrics. Staying
grounded in the infrastructural side of things also
ensures that we can hold the climate story in hand
along with a range of other social and economic
impacts, keeping local concerns in tandem with
global perils. We need both to really turn the
corner on this one.

But, to return to the anxious folks asking me
questions about their carbon footprints at the
start of this zine, | think there are serious
emotional dividends to be won in the work ahead
if we focus on stopping the next data centre from
being built. Instead of feeling guilty about the
climate impacts of our own online habits, or
scowling at crypto or machine learning bros who

are seemingly oblivious to their own, we could put
that energy towards goals with concrete and
bounded targets: stuff we could actually win. It
feels good to organize under a framework that
doesn’t require you to meet impossible ethical
standards, to only ever do less. Instead, you could
find ways to do more, applying yourself to a
constructive project. Plus, this way you don’t have
to convert everyone you meet to your exact point of
view. You can, instead, find friends where you will,
develop the skills you’re interested in fostering, and
be a part of building something bigger than
yourself.

So, please take me quite sincerely when | say:

Happy fighting out there. Good luck.